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April 29, 2010

D-Link Introduces Unified Wireless Network Solution

By Anil Sharma, TMCnet Contributor

D-Link, a major player in connectivity for business networking in organizations of all sizes, including the enterprise, has introduced a unified switch and access point combination packed with next-generation technology to provide optimum network performance for mid-to-large enterprises and service providers.

Officials with the company said that the D-Link (News - Alert) Unified wired/wireless Gigabit Switch (DWS-4026) gives network administrators the ability to manage up to 64 D-Link Wired Unified 802.11n Access Points (DWL-8600AP) by itself, and up to 256 DWL-8600APs in a switch cluster.

Company officials said that the full-featured DWS-4026 offers the much-needed flexibility and versatility found in more expensive unified switches, with the ability to be deployed either as a wireless controller in the core network, or as a L2+ Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) Gigabit switch, depending on customer requirements.

According to company officials, the DWL-8600AP, powered by Cavium Network's OCTEONprocessors, is D-Link's most powerful unified access point supporting the latest IEEE (News - Alert) 802.11n wireless standard.

This device can be flexibly deployed as a stand-alone 'fat' wireless AP or as a 'thin' managed AP manageable from a wireless switch.

Company officials pointed out that the DWS-4026 'fast roaming' feature allows wireless clients to enjoy seamless, uninterrupted roaming from AP to AP even if they are not in the same subnet.

Chang said that by centralizing WLAN configuration and management functions, network administrators can gain the control, security, redundancy and reliability needed to scale and manage their wireless networks with ease and efficiency.

The switch is designed for Voice over Wireless traffic with features such as Auto-Voice VLAN that matches VoIP streams and provides them with a better class-of-service than ordinary traffic.

Network traffic control is managed and made predictable with Quality of Service (QoS) features that support traffic shaping, control per-flow bandwidth, guarantee minimum bandwidth and ensure 802.1p Class-of-Service (CoS).

Anil Sharma is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Anil's articles, please visit his columnist page.